1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a hollow tile for the construction of floors, the floor being made of a combination of tiles and prefabricated, reinforced concrete beams. The tiles have a high capacity for sound insulation, are light in weight, and exhibit high mechanical strength. The tiles are particularly suitable for use in the construction of floors of residential buildings and for industrial construction in general. The installation of a floor using the tiles according to the present invention is carried out by interposing the tile between prefabricated, parallel-spaced beams of reinforced concrete which form the floor-carrying structure. Afterward, a concrete filling takes place for providing the necessary cohesion to the components of the structure.
2. Description of the Relevant Art
Conventional clay blocks or tiles for the construction of floors have a hollow inner structure, e.g., they include a plurality of cavities having a rectangular cross section defined by inner partition walls perpendicular to each other and parallel to the main side surfaces of the tile. The cavities serve to decrease the floor weight and further provide sound and thermal insulation due to the motionless air contained in the cavities. The sound insulation of a floor represents a very important problem since, in general, there are many different sources of external sound. In the case of residential buildings, sources of sound include noises produced in adjacent apartments or rooms, noises arising from the operation of sanitary equipment and the like within the building, and noises arising from the widespread use of household electrical equipment and appliances. When noises are radiated directly in the air (airborne noises), the noises can pass through the floors according to two different paths, i.e., (a) the noise may pass through the air from the source thereof up to the partition wall separating the disturbing room and the disturbed room, and then the noise passes through the partition wall and into the air in the disturbed room; and (b) the partition wall, which is hit by the sound waves, begins to vibrate. The wall may have a number of its own resonant frequencies so that, everytime a frequency of the incident sound waves is at or near one of the resonant frequencies of the partition walls, the flexural vibrations of the wall increase, and the wall then acts as a secondary noise source for irradiating a portion of the received sound energy into the room.
According to the weight law, acoustical disturbances of a homogeneous partition wall increase as the weight of the partition wall increases. This is especially true at low frequencies. Accordingly, the problem to be solved is to construct a lighter, but more complex, structure than that of a simple homogeneous wall (so as not to follow the aforementioned weight law) for providing good sound insulation. Such structures must be based on the artifice of introducing discontinuities into the partition wall and by constructing the wall with heterogeneous materials.